Dhulikhel

Last night I got back from a two day adventure to Dhulikhel, a small Newari village located 30 km north east of the city. Six of us left after classes ended Friday afternoon and took a taxi (which is the size of like a hatch back Toyota) out of the valley. Somehow we all jammed into it, and we were ceremonially pelted with water balloons – yes, the color festival is still going down – on our way out of the city. We stayed in a very nice, but very cheap guesthouse that looked out to the valley opposite of the Kathmandu Valley and the Himalayas – when they decided to poke through the smog. They are just so overwhelmingly huge – we were at like 6,000 feet, and it looked like they were floating. We enjoyed some Nepali festivities on Friday night and then on Saturday we ended up doing a seven-hour, 12ish mile hike. We first hiked up along some dirt roads, through a bunch of villages to a Buddhist monastery situated high on a hill with stunning views of the hills, valleys and Himalayas. As we sat beneath the prayer flaps flapping thinly in the wind, I realized that that was the Nepal I pictured when I signed up. I thought little about the city, and the madness that is Kathmandu and more about those moments when you are sitting high above the world, hearing monks chanting and looking into the deep river gorges and terraced wheat fields and thinking that everything makes sense. I could have stayed there all day, or all week. The hike down through the valley was equally amazing though. We cut through fields and through small villages, relying entirely on people to guide us back to Dhulikel. We stopped and spoke with an old man who offered to let us all stay with him and who was absolutely beside himself that we could communicate with him in Nepali. We returned to Kathmandu Sunday afternoon, absolutely exhausted on another crazy bus. I got back just in time to watch the Grand Finale of Indian Idol on TV with my family. Apparently the city adjusted load shedding so that the majority of the city would have power at 8:30 when it came on. Thank God. The load shedding is actually increasing now so that we only have four hours a day of potential power, sometimes there is none and sometimes there is four. Not much else to report, I could write pages about our escape from the city, but I will spare you all. To leave things on an amusing note, I met up with a friend to walk to school today and on the way, distracted by a bus with a crazy melodic horn stepped in the largest pile of cow poop we have ever seen, wearing only sandals. We then walked 20 minutes to school – great way to start the day. And, tomorrow we are going to have nepali food cooking class rather than language class, but as our head language teacher likes to say, “it’s just not fun,” we also have to write the directions out in the script. Tough.